Relation extraction (RE) seeks to detect and classify semantic relationships between entities, which provides useful information for many NLP applications. Since the state-of-the-art RE models require large amounts of manually annotated data and language-specific resources to achieve high accuracy, it is very challenging to transfer an RE model of a resource-rich language to a resource-poor language. In this paper, we propose a new approach for cross-lingual RE model transfer based on bilingual word embedding mapping. It projects word embeddings from a target language to a source language, so that a well-trained source-language neural network RE model can be directly applied to the target language. Experiment results show that the proposed approach achieves very good performance for a number of target languages on both in-house and open datasets, using a small bilingual dictionary with only 1K word pairs.
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